Created for young-at-heart adventurers, this blog provides information about both domestic and international travel.

Friday, April 14, 2017

Berkeley Byways

When Teri was a young child living in Texas she
told her parents she wanted to go live in

View of San Francisco Bay from Lawrence Hall of Science

Berkeley. Twenty years ago she made
this dream come true. She and John live in a pretty house that is often visited
by opossums and skunks raiding the cat food dish on the back deck. And the wild
turkeys still get the right-of-way on the hilly streets. Whatever I expected
the Berkeley area to be, a home to wild animals wasn’t in the picture. Looking
up into the hills you see houses surrounded by lush vegetation, while in the
other direction there is a wonderful view of the bay. Perched nearly at the top
of a hill is an iconic institute: Lawrence Hall of Science. Out
of this organization come the underpinnings of innovative science education
programs that have been adopted around the country. Before I left academia I
was privileged to participate in the distribution of one of these programs, FOSS. I still believe that the best
method for teaching science and for getting students intellectually involved is
through experimentation; FOSS develops both intellectual involvement and
curiosity to support life-long learning. Teri has one of the best jobs on the
planet; she writes and tests the curriculum for the FOSS modules.

As with the rest of the San Francisco area, Berkeley
was home to the Chochenyo/Huchiun
band of the Ohlone people. Near the mouth of Strawberry Creek and along the
shoreline of San Francisco Bay were at
one time grinding pits and a shellmound; these have been lost to

Berkeley neighborhood

urban
development. In the late 1700s, the De Anza Expedition established the Spanish
Presidio of San Francisco, directly across the bay from what would be Berkeley.
Luis Peralta, a member of this party, was given a land grant by the King of
Spain for a ranch directly across from the new presidio. The ranch raised
cattle for meat and hides, but was also used for hunting and farming. With the
change in national holdings, came a change in who legally owned this property;
eventually it was all but stolen from the Peralata family and parceled out to
various American claimants. The area reverted to a mix of open land, farms and
ranches, and a small bustling wharf by the bay. In 1886 this area changed,
again, when the administration of the College of California decided to move the
school to the area. They named the college and town after George Berkeley, an
Anglo-Irish philosopher. With the college came housing projects, businesses and
industrial complexes. And, as with many other small towns, transportation in
the form of a branch of the Central Pacific Railroad made getting to the newly
vibrant town much easier. The Great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 brought
thousands of refugees into Berkeley, including most of San Francisco's painters
and sculptors, thus establishing one of the largest art colonies west of the
Mississippi River. The Berkeley community continued to grow rather slowly until
1923 when a major fire swept through the area burning about 640 structures and
threatening the university campus. Rebuilding began, but an up-swing in
population didn’t occur again until World War II. Many war industries were
located around the bay and attracted lots of workers; Camp Ashby Army Base was
temporarily located in Berkeley. And of course, a great deal of research went
on at the university, not the least of which was the synthesizing of the
element berkelium.The face of Berkeley was to change from the
1940s forward as the university and town

Sproul Plaza, site of National Guard presence in 1969

became known for political activism.
Spurred by a pushback against McCarthyism, Berkeley
evolved into the rallying place for supporters of the Civil
Rights Movement and the Free
Speech Movement. It also became the focal point for apolitical drop-outs,
hippies, who were looking for peace and love. Unfortunately, the ‘People’s Park’ developed
into the antithesis of the hippie philosophy when it became a battleground
between developers and student/hippie protestors. Eventually the National Guard
was called in, resulting in a month-long occupation that ended with the park
remaining undeveloped. While Berkeley is still a center for political activism,
the tone of the city has mellowed. Humanistic ideas still dominate the city;
domestic partner legislation has come from these interactions as has work on
race relations, protection of the environment, raising concerns about local
versus industrial farming, LGBTQ issues, medical marijuana and other
health/wellness subjects.My misconceptions about what the environment
around Berkeley looked like extended to

Claremont Hotel

the town; roving bands of hippies
playing guitars surrounded by a haze of cigarette smoke was tops in my
expectations. The area we explored had small streets, cute shops, places to
eat, not a whole lot of traffic and hippies in view. There was also an historic
wooden hotel, the Claremont, dating from 1915. It was originally built by
‘Borax’ Smith, a mining magnate, and a group of real estate developers. One of
the attractive aspects to staying at the Claremont in those days was that the
Key Route tram line picked guests up at the lobby steps and took them down to
San Francisco Bay. If you had a car, there was a small tunnel that would take
you through the mountains and down to the bay. The downside to staying in the
Claremont was that the hotel was in a dry zone – no alcoholic beverages were
sold within one mile of the college campus. It wasn’t until 1936 that an
enterprising student from the University discovered that the hotel was just
over a mile away; free drinks for life was the reward for this piece of
information.

Berkeley street scene

Next week Oakland is on the blog list and my reviews of a hotel,
lots of places to eat, and some of the things we did.